We've asked dozens of our clients about what their main struggle is when setting up campaigns and cooperations with social influencers. The 2 most pressing issues seemed to be the following:

Not sure which influencers to work with: There are hundreds of thousands of social profiles on different networks out there. Researching, analyzing and finally deciding who might be a good fit for your brand and its values, in terms of created content and relevant reach, can be overwhelming.

Uncertain about how to compensate influencers: There are many influencing factors to this question, such as audience size (e.g. 10,000 or 1,000,000 followers), the channel (e.g. Instagram or Youtube), the value of the provided product samples (e.g. a $30 T-shirt or a $300 watch), the vertical (e.g. Fashion or Travel), the region (e.g. Europe or US),... In other words, while it might be ok to pay an influencer $200 for a certain cooperation, it might be highly over-priced for another.

So for all of those, who are experiencing the same challenges and for everyone who has explicitly asked us for solutions to these struggles: here they are! 🍾🎉

I. Smart Influencer Selection

Yes, we’ve said it before: Finding influencers that are a good match for your brand campaign is tricky. The way most influencer marketing tools go at it is by allowing users to apply some filters to an inventory of influencers. But it’s not really that simple, is it? The fact that your brand operates in the fashion industry doesn’t necessarily turn any fashion influencer into a great fit for your campaign. That would be a bit like selecting your future significant other by saying “if gender equals male then 😍”…

We’re not saying categorization is a bad thing. We’re just saying that it’s all too fuzzy without a certain depth and granularity. Our advanced influencer profiling now knows 300+ categories and sub-categories, allowing for a much more precise match-making process.

Of course, it's not only about defining these categories but more importantly about how you assign them to influencers. With our latest release, we're pulling in technology such as natural language processing and image recognition to conduct an in-depth analysis of influencer's social accounts and recent postings, deriving multi-layered profiles of social influencers.

In a nutshell, linkr analyses how frequently influencers post about certain topics, use certain keywords or hashtags, what's shown on their images, which other brands they've worked with in the past, etc. We map all of that data to calculate a relevance score for your brand and suggest influencers with the highest score to you. So while the final choice is of course up to you, you can say with confidence that you're not leaving anything to chance 😉

II. Dynamic Influencer Pricing

When it comes to dealing with influencer costs, we have seen 2 different types of struggles that merchants are facing:

There either is a certain budget at your disposal but you are in the dark about just how much reach and / or branded content you are going to get for it.

Or, you have certain requirements (coming from your marketing plan, your manager, etc.) but no idea what budget you’ll have to throw against it.

Chances are, that one of these 2 problems sounds familiar to you 😉
Good news is that we’ve got you covered for both.

While you’re setting up your campaign, linkr listens to all the bits and pieces with an impact on costs. Furthermore, linkr gathers performance and pricing data from thousands of cooperations. We use all of this data to automatically suggest the optimal compensation strategy for your influencer campaign.

For example: based on the channel (e.g. Instagram) the value of the product samples you’re allowing influencers to select, the industry (e.g. Fitness & Sports), target country, reach, market benchmarks, etc. linkr will suggest the required budget. Alternatively, it will let you know how many influencers you can work with for a given budget. So you can play around with different parameters until you’ve found a setup that aligns with your target, budget constraints, etc.

Furthermore, on influencer level, linkr will always give you an indication of how much to pay each individual. In other words, we’re not storing prices influencers gave us but instead look at data points such as reach, engagement, inactive users, quality of content, ratings from other brands, industry, channel, etc. and calculate the optimal price from. Optimal as in “a fair compensation for the value and work provided” for both parties.

III. Intelligent Campaign Briefings

On the other hand, it's too time-consuming to personally invite dozens or hundreds of influencers to join your campaign. linkr recognizes the goals you defined, the type of influencers you want to work with, your compensation strategy, etc. to generate a perfect briefing that will automatically be sent to the selected influencers via email and the linkr notification system. Briefings are broken down into logical segments that can be adjusted wherever you see need or fit.

On top of that, linkr allows you to engage with each individual influencer that joined in on one of your campaigns via personal chat.

Sounds good? Then start your free trial today! Here's how:

Click Signup and submit your details on the merchant application form. For Shopify: We'll pull the required details directly from your Shopify store Here's a bit of background on how our team will evaluate your application.

Have a little patience 😉 The quality of merchants on our network is very important to us so we do check each application individually. We will though get back to you within a maximum of 3 business days. While your're waiting: here's some additional information about the free trial period on linkr.